Rev. Jesse Jackson handing the reins of Rainbow/PUSH to Dallas pastor
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The Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease eight years ago, is stepping down from the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the influential Chicago-based civil rights organization he founded through its predecessor, Operation PUSH, more than 50 years ago.
After ceding day-to-day operations last year, Jackson, 81, is formally handing the reins to his successor, the Rev. Frederick Douglass Haynes III, a senior pastor of friendship at West Baptist Church in Dallas. Haynes’ appointment is expected to be announced this weekend at the annual Rainbow/PUSH convention, sources said Friday.
Haynes said it’s an honor to be chosen for this role. “I confess that when he first approached me about doing this, I was blown away,” he said.
Haynes said he has long been a student and follower of Jackson’s. “One of the things that I am quick to say is that of all of the degrees I may have, I must also confess that I’ve studied at the University of Jesse Jackson,” he said. “I first heard him as a college student at Bishop College in Dallas, Texas, and I was just blown away because I was trying to find my way in ministry. ... Through the years, my formation in justice work had everything to do with Rev. Jackson.”
With the new leadership in place, Jackson is quick to admit his future plans.
“I’m not retiring at all,” Jackson said Friday. “I want to focus a lot more on economic justice, peace in the world. I’m just pivoting to a different platform.”
According to Jackson, pivoting means he will spend the majority of this time teaching about “how to fight the nonviolent fight” when it comes to injustice.
“I want to teach more, all what I’ve learned, to other preachers: How do you fight the nonviolent fight, focus on affirmative action, loan debt, focus on pulling gun shops down,” Jackson said.
Jackson will offer his guidance in academic settings as well as in the field. He said he will double efforts to get reparations for the three remaining survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. A lawsuit filed by survivors was recently dismissed by an Oklahoma judge.
Jackson said he deliberated for a while on his decision to step down as president of Rainbow/PUSH.
“It’s been very difficult to find people who have the ability to step into the fire,” Jackson said. But after speaking with Bishop Tavis Grant, national executive director of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, as well as the Rev. Al Sharpton and Jackson’s son and longtime Rainbow/PUSH national spokesman Rep. Jonathan Jackson, the elder Jackson made the decision.
Noting his less-than-frequent travel these days, and his decades in the struggle for justice, Jackson said now is the time for a transfer of leadership. With someone managing the staff of Rainbow/PUSH, he can focus on fundraising and helping the new leader acclimate to the role. Jackson said the reversal of affirmative action, the continued attack on the Voting Rights Act, and the high cost of college are all on his agenda. He also wants to spend more time getting people out of foreign jails, including in Syria, Kuwait and Kosovo.
“The Supreme Court is setting the agenda — affirmative action, health care for women, rights in education — but we can’t afford that. They’re trying to take back the rights that protect the right to vote,” Jackson said. “The agenda is set by the opposition. I want Rainbow/PUSH to survive in that struggle and we have to have leadership help us.”
Haynes said it is a lot of pressure to take up the mantle after Jackson, but he said it’s “a good heavy.”
“I feel real good about what it is I’m called to do and because of my relationship with him, that is even more helpful,” he said. “I’ll be honest, the response I’m receiving from around the country has been overwhelmingly positive and supportive because ... we don’t know life without PUSH and Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. ... What he was doing in ‘63, we need in ‘23.”
Headquartered in a former temple in the Kenwood neighborhood on the South Side, the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition has long been Jackson’s national advocacy platform to promote economic, educational and political change, including two groundbreaking campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 1980s.
Born in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1941, Jackson gained national prominence during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s after attending Chicago Theological Seminary. The city became his home for six decades, and the center of operations for the organizations he would lead and grow into a movement.
Jackson met the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965, and the following year became the head of the Chicago chapter of Operation Breadbasket, the economic arm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference aimed at promoting employment for the Black community.
Following King’s assassination in 1968, Jackson’s stature in the Civil Rights Movement grew, helping to fill the leadership void. In 1971, Jackson resigned from the SCLC and founded Operation PUSH in Chicago, expanding the mission of education and economic empowerment for people of color.
Jackson ventured into national politics in the 1980s, delivering a stirring speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention and placing third in the nomination for president behind Walter Mondale and Gary Hart, garnering more than 3 million votes. In 1988, Jackson made a second bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, winning the Michigan primary before losing to the eventual candidate, Michael Dukakis.
In 1996, Jackson merged two of his initiatives, creating the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, which he continued to lead into the new millennium.
Other civil rights leaders are already weighing in on Jackson’s legacy and his impending retirement.
“The resignation of Rev. Jesse Jackson is the pivoting of one of the most productive, prophetic and dominant figures in the struggle for social justice in American history,” Sharpton said in a statement Friday. “It was my honor, since my mother brought me to him at 12 years old, to serve as the youth director for the New York chapter of Operation Breadbasket, down through the last decade, to have been a student and protege of his.”
The annual Rainbow/PUSH convention runs through Wednesday, and will feature Vice President Kamala Harris as guest speaker Sunday.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who is slated to appear at a convention luncheon Tuesday, also expressed his appreciation to Jackson as a mentor, friend and civil rights icon.
“The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson is an architect of the soul of Chicago,” Johnson said in a statement Friday.
Grant calls Jackson’s pivot a “tremendous development.” He thinks the new leadership under Haynes is in line with the historical track of the Rainbow/PUSH organization and a “good fit for continuing what Rev. Jackson has spent the last 50-plus years working and developing.”
Grant added that the change comes at the point when Jackson can be a full participant in the transition. “It writes a different history for us in the civil rights community,” Grant said of the move.
Jackson’s eldest daughter, Santita Jackson, said given that her father has been focused on the local and global fight for injustice for so long, she is grateful that God has given him the length of years to deliver breadth and depth of service.
“Very few people are able ... have the grace and space to serve in public life at this level of intensity and exposure, and with such a high profile for 60 years,” she said. “But he’s been able to do that. And quite frankly, we’ve not seen leaders who are Black live this long. They don’t get gray; they get a grave.”
Jonathan Jackson said he’s proud of his father.
“He has never stopped fighting for civil rights, for human rights,” he said. “He has worked alongside Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and carried on in his tradition and in his activism. From having seen the creation and passing and the demonstration, to ultimately passing the Voting Rights Act to now seeing it be dismantled — he’s never stopped fighting. Others thought it was the past and civil rights had been achieved. He knew better. He had eternal vigilance.”
He said his father has always had two professions — minister and civil rights fighter — and both are professions from which one never retires.
“He’ll give this transition his all, as he always has done,” he said of his dad. “He knows his strengths, but he will never stop. It’s his life’s calling.”
Haynes said he feels welcomed by Chicago and sees Rainbow/PUSH continuing its mission.
“For me, Rev. Jackson has always been the person to show up. I call it ‘an emergency responder,’” Haynes said. “So that when things broke out, we knew that he was going to be Jesse on the spot — providing the wisdom, the leadership, the direction in and out of the crisis. I don’t see those things changing. I see those things as what PUSH has been about and what PUSH will continue to be about.”
